Garden-Craft Old and New

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old and the new systems of gardening. This being so, it may be well at once to notice the claims of the modern "Landscape-gardener" to monopolise to himself all the right

century, two heaven-directed geniuses-Kent and Brown-all of a sudden stumbled upon the green world of old England, and, perceiving its rural beauties, and the hitherto un

e their point, they lay stress upon the style of garden in vogue at the time Kent and Brown began their experi

points wherein the new methods claim to be different from the old, what sources of inspiration were discovered by the new school of gardeners that were not shared by English gardeners from time immemorial. Are

, it represents an idealisation of Nature. Real nature exists outside the artist and apart from him. The Ideal is that which the artist conceives to be an interpretation of the outside obje

f your new house. It is a field very much like the neighbouring fields-at least, so think the moles, and the rooks, and the rabbits; not you, for here is to be your "seat" for life; and before you have done with it, the wh

ed land with traces of "rude mechanical's" usage, or suggestions of mutton or mangels. The particular character of the place, or i

e; enlarge this slope, level that; open out a partial peep of blue distance here, or a gleam of silver water there. He must terrace the slope, step by step, towards the stream at the base, select the sunniest spots for the flower-beds, and arrange how best the gardens at their varying levels shall be approached or viewed from the

d-pastoral scenery put fancifully, in man's way. A gardener is a master of

woodland world. It indicates a taste for flowers and trees and landscapes. It is admiration that has, so to speak, passed from the stage of

eye hath caug

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of country flowers, the gladness of colour, picturesque form of tree or contour of land, spring's bright laugh, autumn's glow, summer's bravery, winter's grey blanched face-each thing that has gone home to him has, in its way, fostered in man the garden mania. Inspired by their beauty and myst

dening, I said, has its root in man's enthusiasm for the woodland world. See how closely the people of old days must have observed the sylvan sights of Nature, the embroidery of

hems in Tintern, Fountains, Dunster, to testify to the inborn genius of the English for planting. If the tree, shrub, and flower be gone from the grounds outside the old Tudor mansion, there still remains the blue-green world in the tapestries upon the walls, w

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library, rich in Nature-allusion. The simple ecstasies of the

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every man, except impediment, would walk in the sweet meddowes and green woods, ther to rejoyce their spir

tion as in Perdita's musical enumeration of the flowers of the old stiff gard

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hat wonderful scenes he must have viewed when they were all a tangle of wild flowers, and plants that are now scarce were common, and the

dication is here of the old-fashioned garden and gardener! What nonsense to set up Kent and Brown as the discoverers of the green world of old England, when, as Mr Hamerton remarks in "The Sylvan Year" (p. 173), Chaucer hardly knows how or when to stop whenever he beg

of Nature into the subtle of Art has its dangers. Something may be put, or something may be left, which were best absent. This may be taken as an established fact. In making a garden you start with th

ture, and man, seeing perfections through her imperfections, capacities through her incapacities, shuts her in for cultivati

of realism and of idealism to be admitted into a garden. At this time, in this phase, it was Art, in that phase it was Nature, that was carried too far; here design was given too much rein, there not rein enough, and people in their silly revolt against Art have gone straight for the "veracities of Nature," copying her features, dead or alive, outright, without discrimination as to their fitness for imitation, or their suitableness to the position

ue monsters, or that imply by the scenery that we are living in the days of wattled abodes and savages with flint hatchets. Much, of course, may be done in this line in these days as in the past, if only one have sufficient audacity and a volcanic mind; yet, when it is done, both the value and the rightness of the art of the thing is questionable. "Canst thou catch Leviathan with a hook?" The prim?val throes, the grand stupendous imagery of Nature should be hel

d taste and of common sense. Of things applied direct from Nature the line should be drawn at the gigantesque, the elemental, the sad, the gruesome, the crude. True, that in art of another kind-in A

eelings or that give joy-he may take to himself and conjure with to the top of his bent. It is for him as for the poet in Sir Philip's Sidney's words-"So as he goeth hand in hand with Nature, not enclosed within the narrow warrant of her gifts, but freely ranging within the zodiac of h

earn his craft. We watch him as he hies to the bravery of the spring-flowers in sunny forest-glades; to meadow-flats where lie the golden host o

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w-herb, and king-fern, and mountain-ash afire with golden fruit: to the corn-field "a-flutter with poppies": to the broad-terraced downs-its short, springy turf dotted over with white sheets of thorn-blossom: to the leaping, shining mountain-tarn that comes foaming out of the wood: to the pine-grove with its columned blackness and dense thatch of boughs that lis

gardener freely employed; features and images which he transferred to his dressed grounds, not copying them minutely but in an ideal manner; mixing his fancy with their fact, his compulsion with their consent; flavouring the simple with a dash of the

n an acre or two of land that has some natural capabilities, some charm of environment-given a generous client, a bevy of workmen, horses and carts, and, prime necessity of all, a pleasant homestead in the foreground to prompt its own adornment and be the